Current internet technologies for listing career opportunities or open job positions include, at least, listing available positions on a company's own website and/or listing the job for a fee on websites that specialize in posting job listings (i.e., job boards), such as Monster®, Careerbuilder®, HotJobs®, etc., or posting on other sites.
Potential candidates frequently use search engines (such as Google® or Yahoo®) to perform job related searches. Indeed, thousands of searches are performed daily to locate jobs. Companies (and job boards) are competing for candidate traffic from these major search engines to drive candidates to their posted jobs, whether posted on their own corporate website or on a website that specializes in posting job listings for a fee. Companies competing for candidate traffic to their career websites can use a “Pay-per-click” advertising option. Using pay-per-click advertising, a company pays for ads for their jobs to be displayed at the top of a search engine results. The company further pays for each user that clicks on each advertisement.
Companies that list job openings on their own websites typically struggle to drive traffic to their website. Often, the listings are invisible to search engine spiders for a variety of reasons, some of which are discussed below. At minimum, job listings on company web sites typically do not rank highly in organic search results. This is because, even when search engines can see the listings, the listings do not usually carry useful keywords in the areas that search engine spiders use to categorize and index a website, such as the page title, URL or file name, and metatags (keywords). Company websites further typically do not utilize strategic capabilities to help the search engines to index either their career site or specific online job pages.
There are several problems that often occur on company job sites that prevent search engines from correctly indexing the job sites. In most cases, the company website requires users to enter a keyword to initiate access to the job and does not provide direct links to online job listings (from the careers home page). Requiring key word entry before diversion to job listings prevents search engines from seeing and/or indexing the job content. Also, if a company's search results or job view page lead to a pop up window, the pop up window blocks search engines from seeing and/or indexing the job content. In addition, company websites frequently require people to register before getting access to the job content or search results. Requiring such registration also generally blocks search engines from seeing and/or indexing the job content. If company search results are displayed in a frame window (a web page within a web page), they are not accessed by search engines and, thus, search engines are blocked from seeing and/or indexing the job content.
Many of the issues that lead to blocking search engines from seeing and/or indexing job content are caused by companies using third party services such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). ATS systems help companies manage their active job listings and process and manage applicants for each online job. When companies use third party services to host job content, the companies typically are required to use pop-up windows or frames in order to embed the third party content within the company's corporate site—or to link to it externally. Further, even if search engines were able to access the job content, most ATS systems are not built with search engine optimization architecture. Specifically, search engines give more weight to sites that have keywords in page titles, page names, meta keywords located in job type, meta data in the description including top searched keywords, company name, or location information. These parameters generally are not followed by ATS systems. Accordingly, even if a search engine is able to see and/or index the job content, the job is unlikely to be placed highly in organic search results.
Companies that use job boards to list their job openings have further challenges. A job board typically demands a fee for the service, which can be a deterrent for a company, especially when the company is considering multiple job boards. Additionally, job boards list available positions from competing companies, and in most cases, require candidates to register with the job board in order for them to apply to any specific position. This typically makes the candidates resume and contact information available to all companies who have access to the resume database. Accordingly, recruiters from competing companies can try to redirect applicants away from certain job listings or from the companies having positions for which they originally applied online. Also, in the past, millions of candidates have joined job boards using their resume and personal contact information which has resulted in a high level of unsolicited marketing contact (spam), along with major privacy breaches within even the most popular job boards. This has resulted in candidates avoiding this approach to job searching, and trying to use the major job boards to find company job postings directly using the major search engines. Traffic through job board websites can be significantly less than traffic through search engine websites, e.g., Google®, Yahoo®, etc.
If a company's career site and job content is correctly optimized for search engine indexing, the chances of the company's jobs and career site showing up in “organic” search engine results is enhanced without requiring fees for pay-to-click advertising or hosting on job board websites. However, teaching recruiters or managers to write job titles and descriptions with relevant keywords, and updating them periodically as keywords change, is typically not plausible, nor is it plausible to teach companies to insert HTML codes to optimize corporate job listings or websites. Thus, there is a need in the art for systems and methods to host career website content and to optimize the job postings for search engine placement, resulting in companies driving direct candidate traffic to their career website and job content online.